Corn Kings: Disraeli, Hardy, and the Reconciliation of Nations

Abstract

Dusty, hot, and thirsty, Michael Henchard stops for a drink at the furmity woman’s tent, and there he sells his wife. This drunken act committed by Henchard, the itinerant hay-trusser who will become mayor of Casterbridge, at the obsolescent Weydon-Priors Fair, is one of the last vestiges of a pre-industrial England, representing an agricultural identity that will be not only uprooted and transplanted, but also mythologized and memorialized in the construction of a modernized and bureaucratized national identity. Both Thomas Hardy in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Benjamin Disraeli in Sybil (1845) romanticize the past, but whereas Hardy recalls multiple histories that cannot be revived, merely remembered, Disraeli looks to a particular past to envision a future in which England staves off change by restraining the growth of industrial capitalism and reverting to its feudal and agricultural roots. Both The Mayor of Casterbridge and Sybil are set in rural England during the turbulent years before the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws. I identify repeal of these import tariffs on the price of grain, intended to protect agrarian landowners, as one of the most significant turning points in the construction of imperial national identity.

Alas, the country! how shall tongue or pen

Bewail her now uncountry gentlemen?

The last to bid the cry of warfare cease,

The first to make a malady of peace.

For what were all these country patriots born?

To hunt, and vote, and raise the price of corn?

—Byron, The Age of Bronze, Canto XIV, 1823

Dear Sugar, dear Tea, and dear Corn

Conspired with dear Representation

To laugh worth and honor scorn

And beggar the whole British nation.

—Ebenezer Elliot, “The Four Dears,” 1833